The Suicides - Janet Frame

A Non Religious Funeral Reading

It is hard for us to enter the kind of despair they must have known and because it is hard we must get in by breaking the lock if necessary for we have not the key, though for them there was no lock and the surrounding walls were supple, receiving as waves, and they drowned though not lovingly; it is we only who must enter in this way.

Temptations will beset us, once we are in.
We may want to catalogue what they have stolen.
We may feel suspicion; we may even criticise the décor of their suicidal despair, may perhaps feel it was incongruously comfortable.

Knowing the temptations then let us go in deep to their despair and their skin and know they died because words they had spoken returned always homeless to them.